We are so tired today, and I am tired than my travelling
companion, because Joe is addicted to caffeine sports drinks, and drinks more than a few of these daily, which he spikes with
vials of ginseng or gingko biloba.
We wake up at six a.m. in our tiny hotel room in
Lower Kowloon, and he rushes off to the airport to look for a lost suitcase. I wait in our room until about nine, and
then he arrives with the green cloth bag, and we go out for breakfast at the expected Delifrance.
I begin to wonder what I see in Hong Kong,
as I fail to make big money here, or even middle money, and also do the same things over and over again.
I see now the city through the eyes of a Returning
Born Here, and he feels only the stifling heat.
We are incredibly workaholic, and go off to a Cyber
Cafe, large and air-conditioned, to work on Career Letters, sending off 36 emails, a few faxes, and one phone call.
At 5 p.m. we turn into Dutiful Hong Kongese, and
rush off to the front of the hotel to meet a Chinese aunt, a Chinese uncle, and a Chinese cousin of Joe's. They are going
to store all our valuables, and take us out for dinner.
I start counting at dinner the numbers of hours
we have been up since we left Canada Thursday morning: 48 hours. I then count my number of hours of sleep, and those
were interrupted: 4 hours.
Joe intervenes in a heated debate between Uncle
and Cousin, letting me know he wants harmony.
Sadly, his Uncle has been the victim of pharmaceutical
company experiments gone wrong some decades ago in colonized Hong Kong: he has major hearing problems, like the Sister and
Brother of Joe.
His Aunt is very affectionate towards me, though
she asks me more than a few times How often do you go to church? She is a widow still rather cute in
her early fifties, with a loyal son, and lives in Wan Chai, where she works irregularly, collects a pension, and reads her
Bible nightly.
His Uncle seems to be giving Joe advice and I can
only hope that it is not Ditch The White Person type of advice in my Cultural Paranoia, though of course, it might be done
more tactfully.
Anyone who worries about relationships between
Whites and Chinese must be at a Baby Level of Human Problems.
I have seen a lot worse than that,
and if you give me a hard time, I'll give some of it to you!
We go back to the hotel after finding the lost
suitcase, applying for 36 jobs, and contacting the Chinese Family, and sleep the long healing sleep of the industrious.
